Many people come into this forum and ask questions like "what does Texture Sharpening do? What is the difference between Application/Balanced/Aggressive in the driver panel? The answers have been discussed, but they are usually buried in some old driver thread. You can find Detonator drivers at the following places.

*note* Application/Balanced/Aggressive is known as Application/Quality/Performance in driver 43.45.

*note* Application/Balanced/Aggressive is known as Quality/Balanced/Performance in driver 43.51.

*note* Application/Balanced/Aggressive is known as Quality/Performance/High Performance in driver 44.03.

The purpose of this thread is to create easy access for everyone, and a reference point that can be quickly linked to whenever someone asks about these settings.

It may be prudent to take a look at the summary of my findings, here. I provide concise conclusions in that post, as well as dicuss the driver settings as they pertain to GeForceFX cards.

Tests run with a GeForce3, WinME driver 42.30 and DX8.1
SBA and FastWrites disabled by default
Percentages are the dropoff from the baseline IQ(ie no FSAA or AF)

It is clear in drivers previous to 4x.xx series, before nvidia implemented this system of A/B/A, that drivers were most closely matched to Balanced. So let's see how much faster/slower Aggressive and Application are from Balanced. Notice that both Balanced and Aggressive suffer less of a performance drop when enabling AF than Application does.

It appears that nvidia changed their AF algorithms across the board with 44.03, so that Quality is just as fast as High Performance(or Performance, since HP should be as fast as or faster than P).

Other Errata
I tried using RivaTuner's OpenGL AF patch script. In Quake2 Trilinear I achieved 177.3 fps vs 177.4fps with 4xFSAA/8xAF Application and 205.1fps vs. 204.5fps with 4xFSAA/8xAF Balanced. All in all I have to conclude that either the patch script doesn't work anymore with newer Detonators or nvidia already incorporated the optimizations into the drivers.

I also wanted to try the FSAA optimizations that supposedly exist in RivaTuner as documented in this thread:Discussion

Quote:

OK I've figured it out. After searching in RT power user settings I found this.
"D3D_AntiAliasConvolutionFastMode" It can be enabled/disabled (true, false) via RT. It's false by default. I found that if it's true and in the same time, you enable multisample masking in RT also, then you can have a little faster AA in directX 8 games(generally the more complex ones).

But I've almost sure IQ decreases a little, not too much noticeable with latest det's 42.01 I'm using. However, I don't know if this can be applied in GF cards under GF4.

I could not find such an option. I thought it might be a driver thing or the entry might not exist for gf3 users. I looked on my friend's computer(he has a gf4 and winXP using 42.01) and I still couldn't find it.

I should note that RivaTuner users should be familiar with the OGL AF settings "performance optimization" and "quality optimization." Application uses "quality" and Balanced/Aggressive use "performance."

I think some screenshots are in order to find out what, if any differences there are to IQ between quality/performance AF as well as what Texture Sharpening does, but I'll get to that later. Maybe later today, maybe next week.

edit: added new information and benchmarks with the 43.45 reference drivers.

edit: added new information about the 43.51 drivers.

edit" added new information and benchmarks with the 44.03 reference drivers.

it is the 4th key listed under D3D on my system in RT.
Now, if you are not using the Alias display, but are just using the actual Name display for the keys, you will not see it, you will see a string of numbers. You need to click on the word "Name" next to the little green arrow at the top of the column so that it says "Alias", and you should now see the names of several more keys that previously just looked like numbers.

Now for my commentary. I noticed that sometimes a higher degree of AF was being used than what I specified in the drivers. To ensure accurate results I used RivaTuner to set the AF level and TS options. I also retested Quake2 at the setting of 4x/4x and 4x/2x+TS. The results were the same as before. Although there is a discrepancy in the benchmark results, the screenshots appear to be identical, although 4x/2x+TS is faster than plain 4x/4x.

I think I may test these settings in 3dmark2001 to see if the same strange results occur in D3D.

As I witnessed on my system in the first post, setting the drivers to Application degrades performance by over 1000 3dmarks whether using a gf3 or a gf4 card.

I also tested the FSAA boost in RivaTuner, when the boost is enabled it is denoted by the "+." I was going to use Uttar's AA Analyzer to take screenshots to compare quality, but my friend didn't have DX9 installed, and the program requires it to run. Looking at the benchmark results though, there is no measurable gain from the rumored FSAA optimization, at least in 3dmark2001.